Lol, what? 😂😂😂😂😂😂

You’ve either never left the DnD bubble, or you’re just blatantly ignorant towards 90% of what tabletop roleplaying games are! Seriously, that’s the shittiest shittake I’ve ever heard when it comes to TTRPGs. I seriously hope you’re joking, but I’m afraid you’re not.

At least a third of the TTRPG systems I play don’t even have combat rules because it’s just so irrelevant in these systems. And then there’s the vast majority of systems like Vampires: The Masquerade, Call of Cuthulu, fate, etc. where conbat exists, but is almost completely irrelevant. I’ve played in several groups that go multiple sessions without a single combat encounter and it never felt lile combat was important or missing.

TLDR: Lol 😂😂😂😂😂😂

I absolutely love The Dark Eye in every aspect except for its combat! About half of my campaigns are run in that system and I absolutely love the amount of customization it allows for your characters.

So, what you’re telling me is 5e works well for combat. Which is exactly what I wrote.

But combat isn’t the only aspect of a tabletop roleplaying game. Far from it. Sure, if all you want to do is play out your superhero fantasy of killing ever bigger foes, then DnD works well enough I guess. But for me, that gets boring real fast. I want drama, mystery, social encounters, wilderness survival, interesting travelling etc. DnD does none of this.

Hexxen is pretty amazing. The rules are extremely simple, but maintain enough complexity to still be fun and it knows what it wants to be and focuses on its core goals. Investigation is fun and engaging, combat is fast and dangerous, but not necessarily deadly and there are numerous interesting character classes that you can combine to build exactly the witch hunter you want.

Other than that, I’m working on my own system with a combat experience similar to DnD, but the social complexity and character customisability of The Dark Eye.

And lose the entire fun in the process…

Spike trap? I have spider climb/fly speed! Enemies sneaking about in the dark? I have darkvision! Resources running low and no safe place to take a rest? I cast Tiny Hut!

DnD takes the entire fun out of dungeon crawling just so that a single person can win the d*ck measuring contest of “I’m the greatest” at any given moment

The only thing subjective here is the very first sentence. Everything else is either fact and enforced by the way DnD is designed or an example to illustrate said fact.

What exactly is subjective about the fact that DnD doesn’t have any depth or variety when it comes to anything besides combat?

Oh, and before you answer. Homebrew and cinematic encounters are not part of DnD as a system and using them in your argument will only strengthen my point.

No, 5e sucks. And it’s most obvious when you play on level 1. DnD is a superhero sim with paper cutouts for humans. When you leave out the super powers, then the characters can’t really do anything. Like… at all.

Combat is DnD’s only fleshed out system. Everything else is just “roll a D20” and sometimes add your proficiency modifier depending almost entirely on your class. Give me 20 different bards and I bet 18 of them will have a 90% overlap in the proficiencies they choose.

During combat, the wizard throws fireballs, the cleric casts spiritual weapon and the barbarian rages. That’s cool, interesting and diverse. During investigations the wizard rolls an investigation check, the cleric rolls an investigation check and the barbarian does nothing because they dumped wisdom. That’s boring.

That’s why DnD sucks!

It might be your least favorite part of DnD, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who enjoy meeting a new group of characters and finding out about their particular ticks and specialties.

Because of a simple yet very effective technique I call: “Asking them”. I suggest safety tools for each new group I DM and to this date, all but one group have been open to the idea but after a quick discussion every single player told me that they see absolutely no use in having them and that they will let me know if they ever feel like the topics are getting too rough for them.

BTW, the one group that still has them active pretty much forgot about their existence. I’m a player there and as far as I can tell, the GM is the only one who really wants them.

It all comes down to group composition. If you’re comfortable around the other players and the GM and know that you can just say “stop” whenever, then safety tools add nothing to your experience.

It’s probably a target audience thing. People who need safety tools rarely like gritty realism because it tends to contain a lot of potential trigger points and people who lile gritty realism usually don’t use safety tools because they either don’t have triggers or dissociate fantasy rp enough that it doesn’t trigger them.

So, it’s more of a correlation vs causation thing.

I think you misunderstood. I have nothing against safety tools. I just stated that the majority of players neither use them nor need them and if your group doesn’t include a single player who needs safety tools, then there really isn’t a point in having them. Im not carrying a spare tire while hiking. Doesn’t mean I think that spare tires are a bad concept in general.

So, you’re just disagreeing based on semantics? In that case sure. Safety tools are a group dynamic thing and not a style of play thing. No argument there.

Yes, they do. Believe it or not, but most groups I play in have no use for safety tools. They’re great for people who need them, but absolutely unnecessary for others who don’t have a problem speaking up when they dislike something and who don’t carry around significant amounts of trauma.

Fun fact, in a Campaign I’m playing, my Fey Bard simply “stole” the Deadname of our Cleric and now she has a total of four names and it’s awesome for everyone 😄

The classic: “May I have your name?” blunder

Uh, sounds pretty amazing. Feel free to pist an update every now and again.

So, OP what are you playing. Enemy Within, a custom campaign ore something completely different?

Or you can just skip most of the tables for your first campaign and just add the ones you want to at the moment you want to add them.

The actual game rules are surprisingly simple once you figure out the basics. At least that was my exerience during a 1 year campaign. We only added the critical hit tables like 3/4 in and they’re by far the most iconic thing about WFRP.

Exactly! My prep is pretty robust towards different means of achieving an objective. Usually plan for two to three different courses of action and can improf everything in between. My comment was directed exclusively at the “Yeah, that dungeon looks interesting, but I’m gonna troll the king instead” type of shennanigans.

Yes, of course. I’m not Dr. Bibber, one wrong move and you’re dead. In fact I’ve only “killed” a character like this once. And even then I allowed the rest of the party to retrieve the corpse and resurrect them the next session. Usually my players are observant enough to notice the “Certain death this way” signs.

This is more of a problem with newer group constellations where people still need to proof how random and quirky they can be and where the player GM dynamic is not yet fully fleshed out.

Sure, throwing away 40+ hours of work because one player chose to go completely off rail is fun once or twice, but it gets old really really fast. Nowadays I run my games on a pretty rigid railroad. At the end of the session I ask my players what they would like to do and that’s what I’m preparing. Sure, there’s some wiggle room, but if you decide to do something completely different, there’s a pretty big chance it will result in character death.